


Rage Against the Dying (A Simple Rhyme Gone Wrong)

by elanne



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:23:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanne/pseuds/elanne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River has always been a fighter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rage Against the Dying (A Simple Rhyme Gone Wrong)

**Author's Note:**

> Remix of Eustacie_Vye28's [Tracking](http://eustacia-vye28.livejournal.com/196571.html), for the 2007 remix_redux.

i.  
_The Pax comes softly as a whisper, no more than a breath of sweet wind in the face; down the street a woman smiles, a child stops crying, a man holds a door for the lady behind him, who gives him a flower before she continues on her way. You feel rosy and peaceful, nestled comfortable in the smooth girl-shape of your skin, and you look around for Simon because he's the only one who ever makes you feel like this. He's not there, but a boy tips his hat at you and you smile and laugh and dance your way down the sidewalk towards a happy ending._

The sleeping princess never woke; she faded away long before the hundred years were over. River said so, and, "it's magic, dummy," answered Simon, "like the rose-hedge that grows in the night," but River knew that a hundred years was too long. Even if some magic could keep the princess from aging, her muscles would atrophy from disuse as the long years passed – thirty, forty, fifty – and one day her heart would just stop beating, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump–

and then silence.

Simon had insisted, of course, that the magic would work on her body too, that if a rose-hedge could grow up overnight then a body could go on for a hundred years, but even then River knew that some things could not be fixed.

She knew because of the way her mother looked at her and changed, no longer the smiling lady of the soft-silk hair and floating dresses. That lady was Simon's mother, and River knew her from the pictures, from watching her caresses from a distance. River's mother was different, harder and colder, and River used to wonder where things had gone wrong – which one of them it was that didn't fit.

She thought of molecules and atoms not quite right in their alignment, slipping past each other where they ought to meet, like dancing with Joey Matthews, whose hands and feet were never in the right places. Not like when she danced with Simon, _one-two-one-two_, and if he moved his hand wrong she _knew_ and moved her own to match.

"With your brain," everyone said to her, "you can do anything you want." _Be a dancer be a physicist be a poet,_ they meant, but River wanted to be a girl. A girl, sometimes dancing sometimes not, with a soft-silk-smiling mother like Simon's, so River tried to use her enormous brain to take control of her body – mind forcing molecules into the proper alignment where she and her mother could meet like mothers and daughters in the stories, with a glance, with a smile, with a touch.

River could decline a thousand nouns in languages that no longer existed, but she could not earn her mother's love, and gradually her attempts faded into fighting and cruel words meant to cut and hurt.

This is why she knew Simon was wrong, when he said that of course the sleeping princess would wake. This is why she knows that the story doesn't end with the smiling child or the flower-woman or dancing down the sidewalk.

ii.  
_Under the trees two boys are playing, back and forth, back and forth, hair shining in the sun, laughter on every breath. You breathe, too, and the air feels sweeter, softer, and you find you are suddenly tired, oh so tired. The grass tickles velvet soft against your feet, the air is sweet and heavy. Beside you the boys look drowsy. One of them has yellow hair like buttercups and an impish look in his brown eyes that are already beginning to close. Watch – he lays himself down on the grass, head pillowed on his small arms. His friend is already asleep, lying on his side. Slowly, a butterfly flutters down, resting gently on the boy's cheek._

Everyone is sleeping. You breathe again, soft and heavy, and think of summer days and hodgeberries and earth beneath your toes. The grass is soft against your face, and you'll just sleep for a little while, dream of dancing in the velvet-grass to the sweet music you can almost hear as you breathe and afterwards when you wake you will laugh in the clear air and…

In the Academy they unmade her. She was slowly decomposed and when they put her back together she did not recognize herself. Worse, she did not recognize Simon. She has always known him, one-two-one-two, where his hands and feet will be, how he will laugh and complain and make everything better. Now her words fall away from him and she remembers talking past her mother, and understands that she has always been the one who did not fit.

Her thoughts move too fast for words; language muddles her. She thinks in colors and figures, too-many and too-bright, the ones who lay down, the ones who did not. In her dreams she is one of them. She can feel the Pax in the air, heavy against her skin. She holds her breath until she is dizzy and her lungs ache, but in the end she must open her mouth and allow it in, heavy and sweet, because after all she is human, and weak.

She hears their voices in her head: _You are multitalented and multitracked and can do anything you want to._

She learned long ago that they were wrong, when she could not remake herself to win her mother's love. Now she wants to believe again. She wants to believe that she could stop it, that she could breathe in the tainted molecules (little bits of chemicals seeping into her body, whispering messages to every cell) and reject them. Not to be made better; not to lie down – to stand fast against their meddling and remain River.

But even that hope, she knows, is long past. She has already been unmade once, an unwilling subject to the needles and tubes and waves and charts; she could not stop it then, any more than she could breath in the Pax and reject it. Brilliant though she is, River is human, and her body is subject to the same physical laws as the others, bend them as she may. She can kill not with her brain but with her hands – soft, white, girlish hands, covered in blood.

So when the dreams make their murky way up and haunt her – _walking down the street a breath of wind the woman smiles the man holds the door for the lady who gives a flower_ – she cannot quite make herself believe that she is one of the ones who lies down, just one more girl among the sleepers, silent and still, _two boys and a butterfly and yellow hair and sunlight and velvet grass._

iii.  
"Eight months," yells Mal. "Eight months you had her on my boat!"

She can taste their fear; it is as warm and sticky-sweet as the air that she cannot possibly remember from the world she has never seen. If she closes her eyes she can almost see them, the way she can see other things that are not there, things she could not possibly know _(they're everywhere, every city every house every room, they're all inside me, get up oh please get up)._

Even Simon is afraid, and he is fighting for her the way he has always fought for her, _one-two-one-two_ and hands and feet and hodgeberries. She imagines him now, facing the others like a man on trial, and somehow the two things she cannot be seeing have merged – now it is Simon who is standing in the drowsy velvet grass, breathing deep. _And Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair found a barefoot broken girl and took a breath of air-_

In her mind, Simon sleeps. His story would end like the story of the princess – fading out slowly, dreaming. He has never been one to rebel, unless he was rebelling for her; his body would accept the imposed peace and lie silent.

He looks alone, in her half-dream, so alone lying there in the grass. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of a million people sleeping – he should not be alone, so River thinks of the others.

Kaylee – Kaylee fits soft against his side like she does in both of their dreams, nestled close and warm. Kaylee would go gently into the night, smiles and rosy colored thoughts that would fade without notice.

Jayne, too, though not curled up with Simon and Kaylee. Jayne would be annoyed at his drowsy eyelids, half ashamed at the thought of lying in the sun, but a few sleepy blinks and yawns later he would notice that there was no one around to see him – rutting strange, everyone sleeping at once! – and he would allow himself to lie down, back to a bush, guardedly facing outward.

Inara would spread out a shawl, gold-embroidered; she is the sleeping princess, yet another who will never wake to a kiss.

Zoe is a fighter – perhaps she would resist, impulses wary of the sudden tiredness, gun at the ready – ready for danger, ready to fight whatever it was that lured her towards darkness. But Wash would lower her hand, snaking his own around her waist, and she would laugh with him at the idea that anything might hurt them, here in the sun. With Wash, she would allow herself to be pulled into the heavy sleep, and they would sink to the grass together.

Mal. She cannot quite see Mal in this place; he stands uncertainly, flickering, and somewhere some part of him still walks in Serenity Valley, somewhere part of him still flies. (Still flying, always, keep flying.) She does not know what Mal would do.

The others lie still, and River tries to add herself to the picture; next to Simon, perhaps, curled warily like Jayne or gracefully like Inara. It is not a good end, perhaps, not a brave one, but it would be peaceful and it would be gentle and she would be one of them, just another girl among the sleepers – if only she could make herself fit.

She has known all along that she would never sleep. She has always been a fighter.

iv.  
_There is something inside you. It got in when you opened your mouth – it was in the air and now it's in you and you can't get it out. Fingers in skin sharp and quick. It jangles and scrapes like a nightmare in a too-small space – it is too big you are too small. Scratch and dig – onetwo-onetwo, the old rhythm gone all wrong and you can't find it to set it right. Flesh into flesh, blood sliding into blood across your palms, find and rip and tear and whose skin it is doesn't matter as long as you can get it out. Get it out! oh please get it out! There is something inside you and someone is screaming and the air is sweet and warm and sticky with the taste of blood._

This is where it ends, she hopes, waiting for it to be over; but it does not stop, only fades. She can still feel it coiled inside of her, waiting to spring. Maybe they put it in when they remade her; maybe it has always been there.

Now she understands her mother's fear; neither of them know what she will become.

Footsteps sound outside the door, and she feels it rising inside _(pull apart and rip and tear)_ as Jayne enters. She will not let it end here, but she no longer knows how to speak; her body is the only language that has been left to her. Her feet swing out and Jayne falls to the ground with a surprised thud.

She is a wild thing, and wild things never lie down. You can wound them and they will still run, like the bird she once saw catch its wing on a wire – broken and bleeding it half-fluttered away from her, wings beating against stones, staining them red; and when at last she caught it, gathering it carefully – _little bird little bird I won't hurt you I'll make it better I promise_ – it lay still and limp and dead in her small childish hands.

She is a wild thing, and she has something inside her.

Simon thinks he can tame her; he has always tried to tame her and he is trying now, but she knows that she cannot be tamed. She was not made to submit; not made to sleep. She was made as a rager, a reaver, a tool of death; the instrument of the Alliance to fight others like her who would not lie down.

Flashes cross her mind – bare feet the man gives the flower the boy sleeps so heavy it's inside rip – and Simon falls.

v.  
_The sleepers will never awake. They are everywhere: every city every house every room they're inside you saying nothing get up oh please get up. The street is cold against your bare feet, your dress limp against your calves. You are alive, terribly alive in a world that belongs to the dead; you walk soft and silent, not to disturb the sleep you were not made to share. But footsteps (live, wary, wakeful) break the silence and there are people around you, and although they have nothing coiled inside them they are not sleeping, nor is the thing inside you waking. You breathe in and find that the air is cool and clear._

"No more running," says Mal, and River can see in him the same thing that coils deep down inside her rib cage – _not to submit, not to lie down, never ever to give in._ "I aim to misbehave."

When she looks at him she can see Serenity Valley (this is our ground, this is our little patch of bloody land and mud and bodies, and we believe in it, we believe) and she can see Serenity (still flying, always, keep on flying) and she can see the wildness inside him; and if he is always fighting – if he was born to be a fighter – then the battles he fights are still of his own choosing.

River was made and remade to fight, but she will fight for Mal and she will fight for Simon (and Kaylee and Inara and Zoe and Wash and even Jayne) – and perhaps (perhaps) next to the thing coiled inside her, there will still be enough room for green grass and buttercup-hair and a girl with soft girl-hands, sometimes dancing, sometimes not.


End file.
